CAA San Diego: Ivy-Plus Event - Larry Smarr Talk

San Diego, CATo truly understand the state of the human body in health or disease, we now realize that we must consider a much more complex system than medical science considered heretofore. This is because we now know that the human body is host to 40 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of DNA-bearing cells in the human body and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. I have been collecting massive amounts of data from my own body over the last five years. Having discovered that I had an autoimmune disease, inflammatory bowel disease, this data has revealed detailed examples of the episodic evolution of this coupled immune-microbial system. As similar techniques become more widely applied, we can look forward to revolutionary changes in medical practice over the next decade.
Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.